HTML vs XHTML

HTML, as with everything gets updated. These HTML tutorials on the following pages are based on HTML 4.01. Now you'd expect the next level would be 4.2 or even 5, but nope, HTML has gone in a different direction.
HTML's new version is XHTML 1.0.

Some of you may be thinking oh no now I have to learn a new language, nope, XHTML is just like HTML but cleaner and in some cases easier to use.
If you have been working through these tutorials at EZHTML you wont have much trouble updating as the two biggest changes are what I have already been showing you, type tags in lower case and place double quotes around all values.

Some tags are being phased out with CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) to take up the flack, lets look at what's been changed

ALL tags now must be closed, this includes single tags like br, hr, img, meta and input. But these tags do not have a second end tag, instead they have a built in end tag in the front tag.
<br> becomes <br />
<img src="??" ...> becomes <img src="??" ... />
<hr> becomes <hr />
<meta ...> becomes <meta ... />
<input ....> becomes <input ... />

You'll notice the only difference is the "/" at the end of the tag, apart from that they are used as normal.
Note: there is a space between the end of the tags contents and the end slash.

So why the big deal with a name change when it's only a few tags affected and is forced lower case and quotes needed on all values?
Well you see there are three types of XHTML, Frameset, Transitional and Strict. The first two are pretty much the same except that Frameset is for framed sites. Strict on the other hand has moved away from using a lot of the older HTML values in favor of CSS (Cascade Style Sheets).

At the moment its kind of all up in the air, as not all CSS works in all browsers, which is the effect of the browser wars I guess. Maybe one day they (the browser makers) will wake up and say "You know what, I'm going to comply 100% to the recommend standards just to make the world a better place". Ok wishful thinking but it could happen.
IE (Internet Explorer) would be one of the worst browsers for displaying sloppy code which doesn't really help anyone. Netscape is fairly strict which is a good thing as it cuts out the lazy HTML writers.

Validation is a good way to make sure your pages are up to scratch and working properly. You probably would of noticed at the bottom of every page I have "Valid XHTML" and "Valid CSS", this is to show I do follow the correct standards and hope to lead by example. If you click either one (CSS is the same file on any page) you'll see the page is validated at www.w3c.org, these are the people that make the web standard recommendations. Opera web browser has a built in function, where you can right click on a page (even pages that aren't uploaded) to validate them, other wise you can upload or check URL's at their site. See the related links for more validation sites.

The following pages will show you how to make valid web pages with HTML or you can learn using XHTML and CSS.

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